The Moz Blog

How to Use Search Engines & Web Data to Conduct Competitive Brand Analysis

This week, the SEOmoz crew and I are heading to Pubcon in Las Vegas for one of the search industry's more advanced conferences. However, before departing, I felt an irresistable urge to do some coverage of a tough competition from the world of search marketing and use it to illustrate how search-savvy analysts can use the engines to get insight about multiple brands in an industry.

The inspiration for this comes from two sources, both worth a read - this interview from Lee Odden with Kevin Ryan & Kevin Heisler from Search Engine Strategies & SearchEngineWatch, respectively - and this one - SEL vs. SEW: And the Winner Is? by Matt McGee. The interview suggests to me that there's is considerable defensiveness, hubris and contention over the competing conference series, and Matt's post (along with the water cooler gossip of lots more threads on the subject) tells me the search industry is particularly fascinated by the conflict (no surprise, as our niche has a seemingly unquenchable thirst for drama).

First off, I want to take issue with Matt McGee's post. Matt's an incredibly smart guy, but I think he does a bit of disservice by using a single metric to calculate a brand's reach in comparison to another. Yes, comparing feed subscriptions through Bloglines over time is a reasonable data point to use, but when so much information is available at our fingertips, shouldn't we go all the way?

First, you want to see where the overlaps are between the businesses. From the chart above, I'd say that SEW and SELand are directly competitive, as are SMExpo, SES & Pubcon. The other businesses target similar groups, but probably don't overlap to the same degree. The founding year is very important, because it will help us as we look at comparative data to make guesses about the speed of growth or stagnation.

Here's a key to the data columns above:

URL - the domain of the various properties (note that I've shortened these to fit)

GBlog (1m) - as above, but for only posts that have appeared in the past month

GPR - PageRank of the domain homepage as reported by the Google Toolbar

This data gives us insight into the prevalence of mentions for the various domains. By referring back to this data, we can draw some conclusions about domain and brand popularity in general, including the respective brand penetration and saturation as well as an idea of who's "gaining" ground and how quickly.

Again, some quick bullet points to explain the columns:

URL - This is the same as the above chart.

MS Links - Live says they're shutting down their link searches again in a few weeks, so I'm lucky to have this data. The format used for the search is +linkdomain:searchenginewatch.com -site:searchenginewatch.com to remove internal links. QUICK NOTE - The numbers here jump around so much that they may not be valuable. I just ran 3 queries for the searchenginewatch domain and got results ranging from 600K to 3.5million.

Yahoo! Links - This link data comes courtesy of Yahoo! Site Explorer, where the search is performed with the parameters that include external links onyl to any page on the domain. The numeric data here appears far more reliable than the Microsoft/Live link data.

Trati Auth - This is Technorati's Authority number, which derives from the number of individual, unique blogs that have linked to a site in the past 90 days.

GfdSbs - Google's feed subscriber numbers, which can be found by searching for domains inside Google Reader.

This data is a bit more domain and SEO-centric, but it also tells a great story about the success of the various domains from a web marketing perspective. Link data and feed subscribers are going to be highest for sources reporting the news and offering popular blogs, but even the secondary sites make for interesting comparisons between one another.

Key to the Above Chart:

Brand Name - this is the exact term or phrase I used to perform queries. In some cases, such as "search engine strategies" and "information world review," it appeared from the results that many mentions were meant to be general, rather than representative of the brands, but I've included the data nonetheless.

G#s (6m) - A search at Google, restricted to the last 6 months, for the brand name term or phrase.

G#s (3m) - As above, but for only the last 3 months.

GBlog (All) - A Google Blog Search for the brand term/phrase using the default settings (no time frame).

GBlog (1m) - As above, but limited to blog posts from the last 1 month.

As much as the website metrics are valuable, the brand names themselves can sometimes provide even more insight. After all, not everyone is going to use the domain name when talking about a conference series or brand, nor will they all link. Thus, looking at brand mentions over the past few months can provide valuable competitive analysis.

The numbers in this last chart come from the posted member numbers on pages like SEWatch Forum Members, Sphinn Members, an educated guess about WebMasterWorld, & SEOmoz's internal figures. The "user engagement" data is a pure guess on my part, based on the amount of user-generated content and activity on the sites. The last column, brand recognition, is also a pure guess, based on my experience of talking to, emailing, and visiting folks in the search marketing world.

This kind of data is valuable because it helps us realize the level of interaction users have with these various sites on a regular basis. Not every site is going to have data like this, but if you're analyzing competing domains that offer user engagement, don't overlook this information.

Takeaways from this analysis:

Third Door's Search Engine Land property is clearly a runaway hit. According to nearly every metric above, it's taken only a year to grow to a size similar to SearchEngineWatch, though the latter had a ten year lead.

Search Marketing Expo isn't yet of comparable size to Pubcon or SES, but again, the growth rate over the past 6 months (the first SMX was June of 2007) would indicate that if it stays on this path for 2-3 years, it could leapfrog both.

It would appear that Third Door Properties and SEOmoz both have faster growth curves than either of the other two (although SEOmoz doesn't really compete directly with any of these sites). Between the two, however, Third Door is clearly on the faster path of growth.

Revisiting these numbers in 6 and 12 months would probably be incredibly interesting :)

Hopefully this example serves not only to satiate the curiosity of search marketers wondering about the X vs. Y battles, but also illustrates how to perform a more robust competitive analysis on domains and brands.

FULL DISCLOSURE: Although we at SEOmoz don't directly profit from any of the conference series or businesses mentioned above, we have had professional and financial relationships with all three organizations in the past, and have currently active relationships with both Pubcon & Third Door Media's properties.

p.s. Joe still has a few tickets left for shows in Vegas tomorrow night, so if you're itchin' to see Spamalot or Blue Man Group, make sure to visit his blog.

25 Comments

I am a big fan of SMX, the biggest challenge I see SMX having is defining itself, it's current definition to most is a smaller, more advanced and targeted conference. To grow out of that might seem to undo it's charm and attraction to most semi-advanced attendees.

If you think about it in just sheer numbers, there are more novice users that there are advanced ones in any skill or trade.

The conference that will "win" is the conference that is trusted to be the best for all skill levels, especially the more novice. More people go to high school than do college and so on.

Strategically SES has a damn good set up as it offers much to many skill levels. But...

I have a weird theory on this as far as long tem goes.

I believe that as SEMPO and other such organizations (maybe SEOmoz?) create credible and eventually trusted "levels of knowledge" of SEM there will be less and less need for the novice level conference sessions, and more and more need for the advanced ones.

Good theory Pat. I agree that the seemingly advanced sessions will become more popular in the future. As of now, according to your theory, SMX would have the upper hand, unless of course the other major conference hosts change their models to cater to more advanced topics and/or users.

I also think prices (value) for these events play a major role in whether they are popular or not. I know SES has increased prices for conferences that last very few days and cover more of the same old, same old. People don't like paying higher prices again and again to see the same speakers, same topics and same information. This, in my opinion, is why their numbers seem a little less than they could be right now.

You know, I wonder how valuable SEMPO is. Mostly from reading Wall's SEO Book that is highly critical of it. You'll notice also that neither the Moz nor SB have SEMPO membership badges displaying (though perhaps SEOmoz is a member and I'm unaware) and for someone who personally thinks that with Sphinn, those two sites are the top of the industry, it says something.

That said, so long as there's free info on this and the barriers to entry are next to nil, you're going to keep having more novices than experts. Just because "novices" includes people rotating in and out of the biz whereas experts are here to stay.

Matt's an incredibly smart guy, but I think he does a bit of disservice by using a single metric to calculate a brand's reach in comparison to another.

First, thanks for the kind words, Rand. :-)

I would point out, though, that my goal was never to "calculate a brand's reach in comparison to another." Clearly that requires more research than what I've done -- and your data is fantastic on that point.

My only goal was to track the impact of SEL on feed subscriptions to SEW, and when it all began, Bloglines RSS numbers was all I had.

I think the competitiveness works very differently for the online properties vs. the tradeshows. I used to work in the tradeshow industry, and a sure path to destruction is when a handful of show organizers in one niche all start bad-mouthing each other. It makes everyone look stupid, and I've seen it dry up attendance across an entire niche (i.e. everyone was a loser).

Even if there isn't room for all of the shows at this point (which, personally, I don't quite believe), an ugly public battle is bad for everyone. It may fascinate the hard-core SEOs, but the beginners and corporate people who don't participate in SEO "culture" but make up a good chunk of the audience will get turned off of the whole industry.

Terrific point Octane! I think Sitelinks are definitely highly correlated to branding, but they're also not exclusively associated to that. You'll find Brad Fallon had (has?) them for SEO Expert, depending, I think, on the engine (google.com v google.ca). Similarly, other people have them for non-brand keywords.

I went to Pubcon last year, six weeks after entering the SEO industry. It was a fantastic learning experience because I chose to attend sessions that were appropriate to my level of experience, which was minimal. There were more advanced sessions that I'd have had a tougher time getting through, but the beginners' stuff was there as well, thus covering the "something for everyone" metric. I learned tons.

Of course, the development side of Pubcon is excellent too, although I know I've heard advanced web developers say that they knew a lot of the content already.

My soft-spot for SMX is biased since I attended the first SMX show in Seattle and then spoke at SMX London. However, I thought they were both great conferences. I like the style and feel of the SEL brand and all that's associated with it.

But for today, there is Pubcon. Which we leave for this morning. And for which I am very excited :D

Nice technical document on how to track brand awareness. I have implemented many parts of this into tracking the OneCall brand against brands such as Crutchfield, Vanns, 6thAve, etc. I see I have a lot of work still to do.

It took you all that to conclude that SEL was growing 10x faster than Clickz etc.?

Lol, I'm sure you knew it instinctively, like most of us, but in any case, this was some interesting data.

Regarding brand, I think feedreaders is the best measure of brand engagement personally. I'll personally be very worried if/when Google drops links for feedreaders as its primary metric because while those are definitely a vote of confidence for a site, they're also much harder to obtain in more established niches, where developing mindshare might not be as easy (whereas a great post might get a link, you probably won't subscribe just bc of it). I'll be following how G integrates that feedburner and GReader data into their algorithms...

Lastly, WoM is mostly going to operate with whoever has the industry leaders, imho. Look at the success of Earner's Forum. Most of the membership are small earners who signed up to learn the advanced stuff from big earners. So SEMPO or Shmempo, my bets are on SMX/3rd door for the long term (provided their focus remains on advanced topics where the others are more general). But then, I'd venture to say so are most other people's bets...

Very comprehensive analysis within the SE industry. One thing I noticed is how well SEMOZ lines up against the other more established entities with regard to blogs linking to the site and feeds. Membership/readership numbers for Moz are very impressive and your paid membership seems to be a function of this.

Kudo's for the thoroughness of the analysis to see how well SE entities are "visible" , but even more kudo's for the growth of MOZ.

I agree with OliverTaco that your breakdown of the data is very good. It even goes far enough to make the quanitiative analysis side of me pretty happy. The only thing that might be missing are some APA style figures.

You analysis here not only shows some interesting facts but it has also given me a number of ideas for working with my company and checking references to our main competitors. Thank you!

I love it when folks expand "search engine marketing" beyond the borders of its typical definition. Using search engine expertise to do good, solid, data-backed competitive brand analysis is definitely an application of search engine expertise and consulting that I could see larger brands latching onto.

Whilst I agree with feedthebot (pat?) many of the conferences in the UK have sessions that aren't catering to the bleeding edge of SEO/online marketing, and it's frustrating when you need to learn further.

Case in point - google's "advanced" university course.

Whilst I completely agree with the need for the basic courses and novice sessions (amusingly at email marketing courses when everyone there has been sent over from direct mail and didnt know what email marketing was) there has to be a clear benefit of going to a conference and getting advanced knowledge - I dont want to shell out £1000 for a maybe.

Then again, many industry bosses often dont realise that SEO & online marketing is all about the knowledge and wont shell out for these expensive courses, especially without certanty of knowledge transfer.

Internet Marketing conference last year in london- attended all day- best bit of knowledge? having a coffee with the director of an SEO agency having met randomly in starbucks.

We do a lot of that when we're trying to figure out traffic patterns, but I hadn't thought of doing the segmentation over both time and link type. Very cool.

I am sitting here, however, trying to figure out what action items I can derive from the numbers - because that is a problem we have now, really. We can see in the rear view mirror, but it's not always clear why the numbers are where they are.

This is great Rand, very insightful. I like the fact that you used industry brands as examples and not just any ole' companies/individuals. Personally, I think it makes the whole analysis process that much more clear. See you in Vegas on Tuesday!! Look forward to checking out the Search Spam game, hopefully I am on the list, as I did RSVP right away after that post.